Hung Liu, 2020
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I want my work to be a comfort to people I’ve never known. Hung Liu, 2020 For the artist Hung Liu, engaging with portraiture is an act of empathy. Since the 1980s, she has paid tribute to hundreds of individuals through her practice of expanding upon photographic imagery to create complex, multilayered paintings. “History is not a static image or a frozen story,” she observes. “It is always flowing forward.” Liu, who was born in Changchun, China, in 1948, experienced political revolution, exile, and displacement before immigrating to the United States. She came of age during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and was consequently forced to labor in the fields for four years in her early twenties. In 1984, after studying art in Beijing. Liu left China in to attend graduate school at the University of California, San Diego. There, the experimental tendencies of fellow students and faculty members, such as the foundational performance artist Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) and the feminist art historian Moira Roth (born 1933), cultivated her conceptual approach to portraiture. 1 Liu’s “portraits of promised lands” represent her family members as well as anonymous subjects. Over the past five decades, she has portrayed refugees, prostitutes, migrant laborers, women soldiers, orphaned children, and other overlooked individuals, whom she describes as lost souls or “spirit-ghosts.” Liu reimagines their stories and seeks to honor them with her brush. Unless otherwise noted, all works are by Hung Liu. 2 Curatorial Statement With this exhibition, the first retrospective of an Asian American woman at the National Portrait Gallery, we celebrate Hung Liu, whose paintings have established new frameworks for understanding portraiture in relation to time, memory, and history. Liu’s empathic world view has guided her practice for over five decades. She pictures forgotten histories as a way to reclaim lost lives and reckon with the past. As we emerge from a period of isolation and confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and as we work against xenophobia in communities across the United States, Liu’s powerful vision provides an opportunity for reflecting on the value of resilience and renewal. 3 Hung Liu as a graduate student, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China From 1979 to 1981, Hung Liu attended graduate school at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where students were trained in the style of socialist realism. China had adopted the propagandist aesthetic from the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s, and it subsequently dominated the country’s public spaces and educational institutions. Liu felt constrained by having to adhere to the school’s restrictive approach and found she could exert a greater freedom of expression while working on large-scale murals. As part of her graduate studies, Liu traveled to the Buddhist caves of Dunhuang, in the Gobi Desert, along the Silk Road, and spent forty days examining the stylized forms found in the cave murals. She also visited religious shrines throughout China and engaged with Chinese literary history. The painting you see in this snapshot was a product of her trip. It was inspired by the ancient feminist poem “Mo Shang Sang,” from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), as well as the cave murals. Unidentified photographer; Reproduction of photograph from 1980; Courtesy of Hung Liu and Jeff Kelley 4 Village Photograph 5 (Peasant Grandma) Village Photograph 10(Water Children) The Cultural Revolution began in the spring of 1966, during Liu’s final year of high school. Mao encouraged Communist youth, known as Red Guards, to participate in violent rebellion in order to purge China of “counterrevolutionary” influences. As violence escalated, Mao ordered high school and college students to the countryside to be “reeducated” alongside peasants. Liu was assigned to Dadu Lianghe, a village about fifty miles outside of Beijing, and formed strong bonds with the people who lived there. After earning their trust, she made her first photographic portraits with a Carl Zeiss camera that a friend had given her. Liu’s initial approach to photography was formal and imitated studio conventions, yet she eventually embraced a documentary style. Today, Liu looks back on her early experiences with photography as both “scary” and “exciting,” especially given the restrictions that the Chinese government had placed on the medium. Photographs, 1970–72 Collection of Hung Liu and Jeff Kelley 5 Young Woman Man with Coat and Hat Boy with Hat in Winter During Mao’s “Down to the Countryside Movement” (proletariat reeducation), Hung Liu was forced to labor on the farmland of Dadu Lianghe, a village north of Beijing. She found a creative outlet in making sketches of villagers whenever the community was summoned to listen to revolutionary propaganda on a loudspeaker. She also drew portraits of workers and children she encountered throughout the day. Drawing during the Cultural Revolution was a hopeful act for Liu, an assertion of her creative spirit and a recognition of the individual despite the era of mass indoctrination. Her charcoal portraits from the early 1970s, three of which are shown here, are casual and expressive. They reflect the instruction Liu had received during her middle and high school years, when she often sketched from live models and plaster busts. Charcoal on paper, 1972–75 Collection of Hung Liu and Jeff Kelley 6 Where Is Mao? Images of Mao Zedong (1893–1976), who led the Communist Party of China from 1945 until his death, proliferated as propaganda for his regime, particularly during the Cultural Revolution (1966– 76). He frequently posed with other world leaders as he sought to promote Chinese-style communism around the globe. Hung Liu initially trusted the communist movement and its call for change but watched in horror as Mao’s policies unfolded, resulting in the killing and starvation of millions of Chinese citizens. Where Is Mao? explores the collective memories associated with the Communist leader. Liu felt compelled to recreate some of the historic images without Mao’s facial features. She views these sketches as “anti-monuments,” explaining that at the time, she “was trying to find my own identity as a Chinese [person] in America. I was erasing Mao’s. After all, he didn’t need a face . because even without a face, you could tell it was him.” Graphite on canvas, 1988 Gift from Vicki and Kent Logan to the Collection of the Denver Art Museum 7 Mission Girls Protestant missionaries flooded China during the nineteenth century and established several new schools to educate Chinese youth who were living in poverty. Hung Liu, who has long advocated for children, was perusing a book by W. A. P. Martin entitled The Awakening of China (1907), when a photograph of orphaned “mission girls” caught her eye. The subjects were identified as students at the Girl’s School of the American Episcopal Mission in Wuchang (the old district of modern Wuhan). The range of their expressions moved Liu to respond with this series of portraits. The idiosyncratic drips, layered textures, and specific brushstrokes in Mission Girls underscore the individuality of each real-life subject. The circles, Liu says, are “light and airy . and full of hope.” For her, the round marks—usually painted in a single stroke—signify wholeness and transience. The art writer Jeff Kelley, Liu’s husband, views them as “riding on the surface of her paintings, reminding us of tattoos or thought bubbles.” Oil on canvas, 2002–3 Castellano-Wood Family Collection 8 Chinese in Idaho, Portrait IV, 2004 Dangling, 2005 Chinese in Idaho, Portrait II, 2004 During the late 1800s, many Chinese immigrants arrived in the western United States as enslaved people or servants. Others came to search for gold or work on the railroad. Despite their significant contributions to the country, these individuals were policed by anti-Chinese and anti- Asian laws, which were not overturned until 1943. The population of Chinese in the Territory of Idaho was fairly large in the 1870s but had nearly vanished when Liu began her “Chinese in Idaho” series. These three paintings are reinterpretations of black-and-white photographs from the life of Polly Bemis (1853–1933), the subject of Dangling. Bemis, who was smuggled into the United States and sold into the slave trade at age nineteen, escaped anti-Chinese immigration tactics when she married an American man. She eventually ran a boarding house, among other businesses, on a ranch near the Salmon River, where she was beloved by her community. Oil on canvas Castellano-Wood Family Collection 9 Laborer: Farm Hand (Clarence Weems) When artist Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) first encountered this painting, she immediately recognized the subject. She knew that her favorite uncle had been photographed by Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) and surprised her good friend Hung Liu when she identified him. Lange’s inscription on the source photograph reads, “Delta cooperative farm. Hillhouse, Mississippi. Clarence Weems, a young co-operator on the farm. He remembers the evictions in Arkansas, for his father was beaten and disappeared.” Liu recalls how she was drawn to the young boy’s weary face and describes her technical approach as “topographic mapping.” With lines of saturated color that suggest roads, she likens the marks to tattoos. “They are our scars, our nerves, our stories,” she adds. By translating Lange’s photograph into a colorful portrait, Liu layered new meaning over Lange’s photograph to reinforce the importance of Clarence Weems’s story. She views the bright outlines as “hope, coming from the cracks between things.” Oil on canvas, 2016 Collection of Josef Vascovitz and Lisa Goodman 10 Family Hung Liu was raised primarily by her mother, Liu Zongguang (1922–2011), a middle school teacher.